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Any chance HP laptops are also having this problem?I worked on an HP Envy dv6 last week. For compatibility with the organization, I was to install Windows 7 on it. I configured the UEFI to legacy mode and installed Windows 7. I resolved all the missing drivers and updated the system to a new UEFI version released back in November. I installed all of our standard apps and configured it like normal. I returned the laptop to the user and they used it for two days. On the third day, they plugged in a Canon USB printer and installed the driver. Upon restarting, the computer restarted with a BSoD as soon as Windows would start to load complaining that the BIOS were not ACPI compliant.

I got the laptop back and would get the same BSoD complaint when trying to use Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to install Windows 7 again or the install media for Windows 8 and toggling legacy mode accordingly. The HP UEFI can only be flashed from within Windows but all forms of Windows that I tried to load (Windows Installer, LiveCD, and the installed OS) failed. I wiped the drive using a Gparted iso after reading that old drivers could be a source of the problem and also tried the NVRAM/CMOS trick with no luck. HP says the motherboard will have to be replaced.

Sounds like it could be a similar issue to what Samsung is experiencing. If Matt's post about the UEFI bug is correct, Intel had similar firmware issues about a year ago. Well, most of the OEMs get their base firmware from Intel, but they don't often update to every new release Intel puts out so they could have built off the old buggy firmware and thus still have problems. UEFI is a major change to the core of the I/O system so it's not too surprising to find some serious bugs, sadly.Reply

My Envy-700 went to Indiana under warranty, twice, because the firmware did not conform to specifications. The last time, they kept it until the warranty expired, and returned it saying they could find nothing wrong.

First noticed the problem trying to boot in legacy-mode to the CD. Resolved the problem eventually by doing a clean-install of Window$-10, which required diskpart /clean.

Secure Boot still does not work.

Would like to give a kick in the pants to whoever at Intel said this firmware was OK to ship!Reply

I realize that the lack of testing is an understandable consequence of the race to the bottom, but it still surprises the hell out of me that this problem managed to make it this far. It's easy to see the high-up execs not wanting to fund more testing than they deem necessary, but this should be an embarrassment for the engineers who worked on these systems. I think this hints at a larger problem than just itself.

Imagine an engineer designing the internal components of a laptop, an industrial designer working with them to fit it all into a nice looking chassis and countless others putting a small piece of their lives into that laptop. Now imagine how you would react to the finished product if you were one of them, you'd play with it even on your own time. You would be the testing the product, for free.

I have a feeling the problem lies in corporations like Samsung getting their engineers to work on one small thing on a large number of their products. For example, an LCD expert being asked to pick the best display to fit into 15 different products.

There's no connection between the people and the product. It makes for more efficient production, but lacks in other areas, this being just one of them. I might get slammed for bringing this up, but I get the impression Apple doesn't work this way in their design process. Listening to Johnny Ive talk about the products he's designed gives me the impression he truly puts a small part of himself in his design work. Listening to others at Apple gives me the same impression.

(even more off topic: I don't get the same impression from Tim Cook, which scares me for their future)Reply

...but those of us who own Samsung laptops have known UEFI was broken even in Windows for a long time already. (which is why I bothered responding to the anti-Microsoft trolls in your post 10 days ago)Reply

AFAIK, Asus mobos were the first to do this regularly because they reaped fortunes from first reviews duping the gullible sheeple. Once other mfgs. caught on to the financial value in shipping half-baked crap for rave PC reviews, other's marketeers have followed because it's extemely profitable to do so when the sheeple have more money than technical knowledge or good judgment. The saying is that there is a sucker born every second, in fact millions of suckers are born per second, especially in recent years.Reply

The article quotes:"Unfortunately, if you're using Windows, that'll require you to reinstall it from scratch."

There's a program from Paragon called "Migrate to SSD", which can copy an entire system drive over to a new SSD / HDD and do some resizing if neccessary. It costs about 20€, though, if I remember correctly.Reply

I have a Samsung Series 7 Chronos Np700Z5B whose build date is, I think, April 2012. Back in September, I decided to install Mac OS X Mountain Lion on it and so I reformatted my HD to GPT, installed OS X and reinstalled Windows 7. Windows worked great and booted fine and Mac OS needed some kext work, but also booted.

Then I installed Ubuntu into the next partition (I think it was the 5th or 6th one due to the various GPT overhead partitions used by Windows and OS X). The Grub boot process worked fine for Ubuntu, but Windows was "broken", so I used the Ubuntu Windows boot fix (the exact method I used escapes me right now) and was able to boot all the OSes again.

Everything was fine for a couple of weeks and then I installed some updates to Windows and the machine started to reboot. Instead of going to black screen, then the firmware splash screen, the machine powered off right before it would have shown the Samsung logo. From that point forward, when I pressed the power button, the machine would light up the leds and then power off again after 1-3 seconds.

So I went to Google and read about this problem, but I kept thinking that these symptoms could indicate that the machine was acting as if the heat sinks were loose. So I opened 'er up, cleaned the CPU and GPU, applied Arctic Silver and put everything back together. *And it worked!*

The machine was fine for about three hours, and several more reboots, and then it went to sleep and when I tried to wake it up the same thing happened. Since I hadn't replaced the screws yet (not wanting to tempt Murphy), I opened it up, loosened some of the heatsink screws and the machine worked solidly for a week or so. But, every time I tightened those screws it would malfunction as before!

I assumed that the BGA CPU and/or GPU adhesion had some problems on this motherboard, so I sent it back for warranty repair. And, even though it took a total of 3 replacement MBs (and eventuallyalmost every other part except the ottom cover and the optical drive) to fix the problem, I finally got a working Series 7, but I'm not so sure that I trust it!

My point here is that the Ubuntu 12.04 UEFI install worked fine on my machine with it's freshly updated BIOS and caused no problems whatsoever with that particular Samsung S7. (Other than the known Windows 7 boot problem and related fix.) So I suspect that there is more to this situation than meets the eye - but since I got the machine back, I installed Windows 8 in UEFI mode and I'll confine my Mac OS X and Linux booting to VMware... for now.

But, I'll probably yield to temptation and install one or both into the partitions that I've reserved for "future expansion", LOL.Reply

hi, I have a problem with a Fujitsu lifebook A532, I have changed the screen that was cracked having beaten with an object, practically does not see 1\3 to the left of the screen. I ordered a screen with the same features, serial number and everything. I installed the new screen and it works, but only after nearly loaded windows; the bios and the initial part of the loading windows 8 cause no reaction on the screen. If I enter the bios with f2 or restart Windows in Safe mode, the screen stops working and I can not see anything even off everything and starting normal. I should replace the old broken screen and everything is back to work and I can replace the new screen again and as before that only works after almost loaded windows 8. I also tried to use a external display, 1 asus lcd 16 "and 1 Philips CRT 17", and both work fine just once almost loaded windows 8.Maybe it could be a consequence of the secure boot of windows 8 pro, maybe this mode don't use the new screen because don't recognise the firmware of the new screen. I know from windows that this mode is activated; I don't know as I may turn off this secure boot in the A532 ;Reply

Brand new Samsung NP540-U3C. I installed Windows 7. Everything seemed fine. BTW machine ran just as fast as Windows 8. Yesterday machine locked on wakeup, I hit power, brief blue screen about a driver crash. Now bricked. Boots to boot option screen, goes no further. Back to Best Buy to look at an Asus.Reply